Coffee Choice

The following would hardly make it through an academic review process, but here are some observations based on our 2008 sampling of reader nominated coffees (this speculation has a margin of error of somewhere around 100%).

1. Current specialty coffee drinkers may be losing interest in extreme dark roasts, and fewer small regional roasting companies are roasting all of their coffees dark regardless of origin.
2. On the other hand, few of the smaller roasters we sampled have migrated to the newly trendy medium-to-light roasts. Most are situating themselves right in the middle of the roast spectrum — in artisan-roasting terms, just into the second crack.
3. Small roasting companies and their customers continue to interest themselves in coffees certified Fair Trade and organic.
4. It appears that few of the nominated roasting companies have jumped onto the micro-lot bandwagon. (Micro-lots are very tiny lots of extremely refined coffees, usually sourced directly from small growers.) Most nominated coffees appear to be from old-fashioned macro-lots sourced through the regular specialty supply chain, identified rather broadly by origin, coffee type, certification or occasionally farm. Names were familiar, ranging from Tanzanian Peaberry (a favorite, with several nominations) through well-established Central American estate names to plain old Colombia.
5. Small roasting companies continue to sport names that lean toward the rustic and irreverent: Rusty Car Roasters, Muddy Dog Roasters, Wildfire Roasters, and not reviewed here, Black Bear Microroastery (with its Hibernation Blend) and Pike's Perk (in Colorado of course).
6. The great majority of nominations came from the middle part of the country, between the coasts. It may be that readers and roasters in those parts of the country feel left out, though I hope not. The reader who nominated the excellent Yirgacheffe from San Antonio-based Wildfire Coffee Roasters (90) wrote that he "would like to see a roaster from a non-traditional (for most roasters) part of the U.S. get a mention."
7. The quality of this sampling overall was arguably better than past Readers' Choice samplings. There seemed to be fewer outright defective green coffees and more tactful, origin-sensitive roasting.
8. On the other hand, a surprising number of mildly musty coffees turned up, though most were the kind displaying the pleasant, roundly rich kind of mustiness that can be safely glamorized as earthy. 

What is your choice of coffee product?